The Outer Limits: "Patient Zero"

I really enjoyed this episode of the Outer Limits because I found it very interesting and the way of time travel was pretty cool. Basically, there is a group of people from a time period of the plague, a deadly disease that is killing everyone. This group of people decides to send a man back in time to kill 'patient zero' so that the plague never starts. They send the man back in, what you could call a time machine. It is surrounded by coils and when he is send back it looks almost as if he is electrocuted and there are flashes of light. He seems to go through some pain that goes away quickly. The man, who is sent back, has lost his wife and child to the plague and is very eager to kill patient zero. When he gets to the past, he is run over by a car, and patient zero, who is a girl, comes to his rescue. He is taken to her house where he eats dinner there and sleeps. He slowly begins to learn more about her and realizes she is a good person and can't seem to kill her. When he does not go back to the future when expected, another man is sent back to finish the deed. The first man then finds a way to stop the plague without having to kill anyone, and has the rest of the day to do it. The doctor that patient zero has to come into contact with to start the plague, is beat up by him and told not to see patient zero ever again. This would stop the plague from happening. But the second man coming from the future then tells the first that his plan was right, but in doing it, he became patient zero. To become patient zero, you had to come into contact with the bodily fluids of three people, all of which he did. The episode ended with the first man being killed. A question that I had was, if he died in the past, then wouldn’t his child never exist?  I thought that this story demonstrated a good way to use time travel, which is to stop a worldwide epidemic.

Short Story: "The Garden of Forking Paths"

First of all, I did not really like this story at all. This is mostly because it really did not make any sense and did not have any time travel involved. The first half of the story is talking about a man who decided to spend his life building an 'infinite labyrinth', which turns out to be in the form of a novel. He writes a letter to his descendants and says that it is 'to various futures (not to all).' This means he is talking about the forking of time, which is the possible future’s time may have. This may not be true, just what I got out of it. This idea is very interesting to me. Something that I thought was really cool was when a man is talking about an infinite book. He said the only reason it could be infinite, was by being circular, and having the last page identical to the first. I think that this was really interesting, but it does not have anything to do with time travel. Back to the infinite labyrinth, it is represented by a garden of forking paths, which is all the possible outcomes, all happening, creating forking paths. I think that this is saying that time can be going in many different possible ways. Also, the story talks about time being, "an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent and parallel times." This again relates to the forking paths and how time is always going and creating new times, in which we may live in one or many of them, but not all, I think. It also says, "Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures. In one of them I am your enemy." I think that this is a cool idea, kind of talking about alternate dimensions, which I think that it is unlikely to happen. Another intriguing idea is when one guy talks about how around them surrounds invisible humans, all of which exist in different dimensions and are he, and the man he is talking to. This is actually kind of freaky, but also is probably not true. This story was very confusing and did not make a lot of sense. But I did mention the things I got out of it that had to do with the subject of time, even though there was no time travel. The things I did mention, I thought were good ideas but one question I had was, if there are so many dimensions, and we possibly live in more than one, would you remember the one you lived in before?

Timeline: The Movie

This movie I thought was very because I liked how it involved scientists actually discovering time travel in a way that is realistic. Scientists were trying to send objects from one place to another, by what they called 'faxing'. This was not intentionally supposed to turn into time travel; they just wanted objects to be sent to different places, in the same time. One time, they decided to try a real person, which worked. They did this multiple times, when the man never reappeared. They used multiple cameras, and when they checked them, they realized the man was not only sent to the wrong spot, but to the wrong time. This, I thought, was very cool. Somehow or another, they found out that the machine used, created a wormhole, which was opened by the machine and sent the man back to the past. The scientists gathered information that if the time machine was used multiple times, one time while travelling, you could obtain damage to your bones and kill you. They do not mention this to the group of people they recruited to travel back in time to retrieve the man. In this group of people, is his son. Another interesting part of this movie was that, to get back to their present time, they had these little gadgets called 'markers'. They wore them around their necks and when they wanted to return home, they would press the button. The only set-back was that the markers had time limits, and when the time went out.... they could not get back. Also, you could not get back if you lost it. When the group of people gets there, they realize that it is right before the French attack the English in the fourteenth century. This means there is a lot of war and the majority of the people from the future are killed. They spend most of the movie trying to get the man who was sent back in the first place, and trying to get back to the present. Along the way, they discover things that were in ruins in the future, and saw them in their actual time. I thought that this was very cool and that it would be something really awesome to see. This could be potentially a reason to create and use time travel, which is to get more information about our past. I think that this movie demonstrates a way that time travel could actually happen realistically, which is by an accidental wormhole. We all know how weird this Universe can be and all the weird things that it does and crazy stuff it has.

The Outer Limits: "The Man Who Was Never Born"

I thought that this episode was very interesting and had a different method of time travel that did not include a time machine, but a spaceship instead. A man is travelling through space and seems to hit some sort of time-barrier that brings him to the future. He lands on the planet that was Earth. He finds that it is deserted accept for a strange man with a face that looks anything but human. The strange man explains to him that the human race was almost extinct because of one man who messed with alien and human genes. They decide to go back in time and correct this problem. When they are in the spaceship, the human from the past dies which leaves the human from the future, Andro, alone to land on Earth. He uses 'hypnotic suggestion' so that people won't see what he actually looks like. He ends up falling in love with a girl who turns out to be the mother-to-be of the man who caused all of the problems. Andro meets the father to be of the guy also, and causes a scene at their wedding and runs away. The lady follows him and tells him that she never thought she actually loved the other man.  Andro tells her who he actually is, and why he is there, so she convinces him to let her come with him back to the future. When they get back into the spaceship, Andro starts to disappear because, by taking her with him, he creates a world in which he never existed. This episode again supports the idea of changing one little thing in the past makes a whole new future. I think that the idea of a wormhole of some sort or barrier could exist somewhere in the world, maybe in space, like in the episode. This would be a very cool discovery, but could be a possible problem or have a dangerous outcome, like this one happened to have. But, if it saves the human race, I guess it would be worth it.

"Back to the Future" Trilogy

Recently I have watched the "Back to the Future" Trilogy. These movies really support the idea of time travel. Since there is so much information in the three movies, I am just going to try to do a short summary of all three and how they are relating to travelling through time. First, in the title, it is kind of obvious. The movies surround the life of a boy whose name is Marty and a man who everyone calls 'The Doc'. The Doc is a mad scientist who creates lots of different machines. One day, he decides to create a, you guessed it, time machine. This time machine is a little different than others. It needs a little bit more to get it going. Plutonium. The movies have many similarities, but also differences. They are similar by the fact that they all involve time travel, obviously. They also involve going into the future or the past, changing one little thing, which then changes some other part in time. This kind of got confusing, but you get the hang of things. There differences are that each movie travels to a different part of time for different reasons. In the first movie, The Doc first shows Marty the time machine and how it works. The Doc ends up getting shot by tourists and Marty uses the time machine to go back in time really just to check it out. For some background info, Marty's father met his mom when Marty's mom's dad (Marty's grandfather)  runs over Marty's father with a car. They fall in love and have Marty. Long story short, Marty saves his dad, and causes his mom to fall in love with him instead of meeting Marty's dad. Marty spends most of the movie trying to get his mom and dad together and becoming friends with his dad. He then heads back to the future to find that The Doc had been faking death. In the second movie, The Doc, Marty, and his girlfriend head to the future because apparently, Marty and his girlfriend’s kids are badly behaved and that needs to be fixed. When they get there they find the children. I thought it was really cool because the future at the time the movie was made was 2015 so it suggested that in a couple years we would have flying cars, phone goggles, and voice activated greenhouse overhangs. In the future, there was a book that had all of the winning teams of sports in it. A man finds this and the time machine, goes back in time, and uses the book to become rich. Marty travels back to the past, and finds out that the neighborhoods have gone bad and that the world was just terrible and poor. He also finds that his mother is remarried to the man, whose name is Biff. Marty then travels back to when the man receives the book and spends the movie trying to retrieve it and save the world's past. At the end of the movie, Marty gets a letter from a man that was written by Doc saying that he has been taken back to the old west where the time machine has been buried in the ground. The letter says not to come and find Doc, but Marty does not listen, and finds the buried time machine and travels back to the old west. During this movie, they spend the time trying to get the time machine working, because it also requires gas, which had not been invented yet. Marty gets back to the future, but Doc does not, in trying to save the girl he has fallen in love with. The third movie ends with the Doc coming to Marty's present time, in a 'time train' he has created to the future to find Marty. He has along with him, two children and the women. He goes on to say that he has travelled to their pasts and futures, and has many more stops to go.

Short Story: "The Skull"

I thought that this short story was very interesting and had a surprise element to it. The main guy, Conger, is a hunter. He is promised that he will get out of jail if he goes back in time to kill a man who was called the Founder, and gave a famous speech that had impacted the world in a way that they did not like by creating a religion. Conger has one thing to help him identify the right man, his skull. I find that this is very interesting and also kind of creepy. Conger goes back in time to find the day that the Founder had made his speech, so he can stop him. The Founder made the speech in a small town so everybody had known everybody. This is why people would stare at Conger when he walked by and they thought that he was kind of strange. The guy had told Conger that the Founder was new to the town and no one, had known him. Conger then goes to the place that was where the Founder was supposed to make his big speech. When he goes to look at the skull in his hands, he finds the skull is actually his own. This was the surprising part that I had no idea was coming. Conger seems to be comforted by the fact that he will be born later on in time, which is his original birth. He sees the cops coming towards him, and makes a small speech, saying "I have an odd paradox for you. Those who take lives will lose their own. Those who kill will die. But he who gives his own life away will live again!" This created the religion. What happened was, Conger was born, then goes back in time and dies in the past, while creating an event that had already happened in the normal timeline. In his (Conger's) timeline, that was the ending event. So this story kind of has two timelines that it is focusing on. I was confused about this at first but it really is not as complicated as you may think. The story left me wondering if Conger being born in his timeline really was him coming back to life. "The Skull" also made me realize that speeches can impact the entire world whether they are just a couple words long or a couple pages.

The Twilight Zone Episode: "A Kind Of Stopwatch"

The episode, "A Kind Of Stopwatch" from The Twilight Zone I do not think is necessarily time travel, but does have a lot to do with what can happen when you mess with time. It is surrounds the life of a man name McNulty who no one really likes being around. He is a very talkative man who is stuck-up and annoying. McNulty was fired from his job shortly after the show starts. He heads to the bar he always goes to after work and talks to the bartender who is really his only friend. Quickly, the two of them, and one other man are the only ones in the bar, since McNulty seems to drive everyone out of wherever he goes to. The only man left, calls McNulty over and they get to talking. Of course, McNulty seems to be the only one who is talking, but the man, whose name is Potts, does not seem to mind it. Potts soon hands him a stopwatch, which is claimed to be an old family heirloom. McNulty seems to think that it is an odd gift, but takes it anyways. This turns out be not a very great idea. Later on the next day, at the bar with the bartender, McNulty gets out the watch and presses the button on the top. He realizes that pressing the button stops all of time. He uses it on the bartender, and finds that it when you press the button again, time starts itself as if nothing happened and the bartender finishes the sentence right where he left off. McNulty then uses the watch for personal gain. He first tries to get him job back by trying to show how the stopwatch works. He fails at this. He goes to the bar and tries to convice eveyone that the stopwatch stops time, and fails at this too.Then he decides to use it for something else, robbing banks. When he gets to the bank and is about to leave with the money, he drops the stopwatch and breaks it while everyone is frozen in time. McNulty tries to get it to work again, and tries to get at least one person to respond, but no one does. Everyone is frozen in time forever and McNulty is all alone. The episode ends with him shouting, "Somebody move! Talk! Say something! HELP!" I wondered if Potts had known what the stopwatch could do, and gave it to McNulty out of kindness, or to get him to stop being so rude. But maybe he had not even known what it did at all.